• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 994

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Place shapes identity – a case from Georgia's Greek community

Authors: Höfler, Concha Maria
Submitted by: Höfler, Concha Maria (Europa-Universität Viadrina, Germany)

Acknowledged as “ethnically” Greek, members of Georgia's Urum Greek community in many instances use place rather than ethnic categories to establish their identity. Originating from parts of the Ottoman Empire and speaking a Turkish rather than Greek variety, the process of their identity construction and negotiation is a highly complex issue. While their 'Greek' identity is very important to all my informants, it is not portrayed as the most salient one in all contexts. Place – namely the difference between living in the capital Tbilisi or in the rural villages of Tsalka – emerges as a reference point potentially overriding feelings of ethnic belonging. Place as a marker for identity formation among Urum Greeks of Georgia, therefore, will be at the centre of my paper.
The Greek community of Georgia is linguistically divided into Urum Greeks and Pontian Greeks. Historically, both “groups” moved from the Pontos region on the Black Sea coast to present day Georgia, starting in 1828. They settled mainly in the rural area of Tsalka. Within the past 20 years, most Greeks have left Georgia, leaving only around 2000 to stay there.
My corpus comprises Urum narratives and qualitative interviews in Russian and English. The narratives were collected for the Documentation of Urum Project by Skopeteas et al. (2011). 16 speakers narrated how the Urum people came to Georgia and described the changes in their lives since Georgia's independence in 1991. For additional insight into processes of identity construction, I conducted 5 semi-structured qualitative interviews in Russian and 3 in English with members of the Urum Greek community living in Tbilisi in 2010.
I follow Le Page & Tabouret-Keller (1985) in treating speech acts as Acts of Identity and Brubaker (2004) in being more interested, analytically, in the process of group formation – or groupness – than in treating “groups” as real entities in the world. Furthermore, the linguistic analytical tools found in Hausendorf (2000) and Dijk (1988) have proven immensely helpful.
The analysis shows that although "ethnicity" may play a part in group formation, in- and out-groups are not necessarily construed along ethnic lines alone. For the Urum Greek living in Tbilisi, their “co-ethnics" who emigrated from the rural villages of Tsalka to Greece are portrayed as a less fortunate out-group, from which my informants strongly dissociate themselves. Thus, place in the dichotomy of “we here" versus “them out there" plays a major role in the way my informants construct and negotiate their identity.
References:
Brubaker, Rogers (2004) Ethnicity without Groups. Harvard University Press.
Dijk, Teun van (1988) Communicating Racism. Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk. Newbury Park: Sage.
Hausendorf, Heiko (2000) Zugehörigkeit durch Sprache. Eine Linguistische Studie am Beispiel der Deutschen Wiedervereinigung. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Le Page, Robert B. & Tabouret-Keller, Andrée (1985) Acts of Identity. Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. CUP.
Skopeteas, Stavros; Markopoulos, Athanasios; Sella-Mazi, Eleni & Verhoeven, Elisabeth (2011) “Documentation of Urum. Project Report”. Universities of Athens, Bielefeld, Bremen & Potsdam. http://urum.lili.uni-bielefeld.de (01.08.2011)